


Bring One Morning

by thewickedloki



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Destroy Ending, F/M, Mass Effect Spoilers, Post-Mass Effect 3, Sole Survivor (Mass Effect), Spacer (Mass Effect)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-06 21:36:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12826608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewickedloki/pseuds/thewickedloki
Summary: Shepard, after choosing to destroy all synthetic life and rid the galaxy of the Reapers forever, watches the stars from the wreckage and prays for one more morning to dawn.





	Bring One Morning

**Author's Note:**

> Contains spoilers for Mass Effect 3 and the Destroy ending. Also contains content that may be upsetting to some readers, including content dealing with suicidal thoughts, trauma, a crisis of faith, and other potentially depressing content. If you're going to read this, please make sure that you remember to do something to make you smile afterward. Have a glass of water and look at a picture of a sunrise. Here's a good one. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Hazy_Crazy_Sunrise.jpg/1200px-Hazy_Crazy_Sunrise.jpg

> "Let me remember how it used to be, and bring one morning back again." — Charles Dickens, _David Copperfield_

No one is supposed to know what the other side of death looks like. That's what makes a mortal person. Keeta'd had plenty of conversations with her philosophy and diplomacy professor father on this very subject, and they'd both agreed that understanding life and death on that level would be too much for the mortal mind. Understanding the nature of the universe or any sort of concept of God would, in effect, make you _become_ God. That's why religions on Earth had struggled so much after the discovery of the mass relays and the sudden, rapid expansion of the known universe to humanity; it was simply too close to God in so many ways. Keeta had always thought so, anyway. She'd reached up toward the stars since the moment she'd come into the world, and had never stopped, because she _knew_ in the depths of her heart that the stars were the closest she'd ever come to God. But God was an abstract concept to her, and the stars were real.

The wreckage of the Citadel gave her a clear view of the stars, but she wasn't seeing God this time. She wasn't tasting or smelling God, either. The tang of copper and ash burned along her nostrils and tongue, coating her throat until she couldn't remember what air was supposed to be. This was death, but an entirely different death than she'd experienced before. Keeta couldn't do much more than breathe, and even that was so painful that she was just about ready to stop. Wasn't she entitled to some rest, after all this? The last time she'd died, it hadn't hurt this much.

Her teeth chattered, and she took a moment to consider how she was able to feel so cold while her insides were burning, and her skin was on fire. This was like waking up in the Cerberus lab again, after the softness of her death. Her body had been new then, raw and exposed, and movement had been violently painful. The lights stabbed into her squinting eyes, her muscles tearing apart and the marrow in her bones scalding her from within.

_Each jerk and pulse of her body was involuntary as her lungs screamed for oxygen, but it didn't hurt. There was agony in her chest, but it seemed distant and disconnected. Keeta was cold, and God, she was tired. This was peaceful, in a strange and heartbreaking way. It was time to sleep now, time to rest and become someone new in another life, if her consciousness was meant to move on. No more violence, no more war, no more nightmares of gaping, screaming death bursting from under her feet. She was among the stars and she could sleep._

This time, her body felt old and broken, but it burned in much the same way. Miranda had said something about the cybernetics trying to repair the damage too quickly, which is why she was supposed to remain unconscious for just a little while longer. But... Keeta would have laughed if she had the strength. Those same cybernetics would be inert inside of her now, after activating the Crucible. Her flesh had forgotten how to knit back together on its own.

Keeta's head jerked up, and she realized with a wince that she'd lost consciousness, but there was no way to know for how long. There was no lab in flames around her, no voice bringing her back from a death dream that had been much more peaceful and soothing than the harsh life she'd been ripped back into. There was only the vast expanse of stars, and the still corpses of Reapers hanging ominously over Earth. Her vision was blurred; was this the lack of cybernetics to sharpen her senses, or were there tears in her eyes? She couldn't tell. There was too much pain blinding her from any sensation of moisture spilling down her cheeks.

The biggest difference, she realized, between this time and last, was that Keeta wasn't slipping quietly into apathy and despair that was so foreign to her. She didn't want to die this time. Instead, she was raging, her whole body shaking and shivering with the scream she didn't have the strength to utter. Garrus was out there. Garrus had made her believe in survival again, had made her hope when he himself was incapable of seeing anything but the worst... except in her. She had promised Garrus that, in spite of his determination to expect the worst, there would be a future at the end of this war. She could hear her father's voice in her mind, reciting that same damned poem he'd always recited to her mother before a mission. _"Just in case,"_ he'd told her.

_Do not go gentle into that good night,_  
_Old age should burn and rave at close of day;_  
_Rage, rage against the dying of the light._

_Though wise men at their end know dark is right,_  
_Because their words had forked no lightning they_  
_Do not go gentle into that good night._  
  
_Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright_  
_Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,_  
_Rage, rage against the dying of the light._

And Keeta was raging, raging against a body too broken now to respond to her desperation to live, to find Garrus again and latch on and never let him go again, to find Joker and beg his forgiveness for condemning EDI so that they could all live, to cling to Kaidan and Liara who had seen something in her on the SR-1 that she hadn't been able to return and who deserved so much more than the hell they'd been through (and had they stayed out of love for her?), to sit with Tali and just watch the landscape of Rannoch spreading out before them. She raged to find her mother and admit that, yes, after all this time and suffering, she was still glad to have been in the Alliance, but she deserved her damned captaincy now and then she could find a quiet job somewhere that involved more talking than shooting. She raged to run into her father's arms as she had when she was a little girl, to hear him call her Chicken and cluck at her until she laughed through her sobs, and then to talk with him about the nature of death and God and everything else.

Her head jerked again. More time lost. The Reapers were still there, and she stared at them, as if daring them to move. She was angry now. How dare they conform to their programming with such lethal efficiency? How dare the Illusive Man follow her from Akuze, casting his shadow over her dreams and, at the very last, taking Anderson from her before she'd put a bullet in him? How dare Anderson die? And Legion? And Thane? And Mordin? _Mordin._ Keeta could feel herself crying now, and she didn't have the energy for the sobs that shook her already shattered frame.

Why did she keep living when they couldn't? Why couldn't she trade?

She didn't jerk awake this time; Keeta came to gradually, much as she had in the lab when Miranda had been calling her name... she was calling again, now, wasn't she? That was her voice cutting through the dark and demanding that she live, demanding that she hold on. Just like last time. The lights were still too bright. _Was she hallucinating?_ Her tongue was dry and thick in her mouth, but her lips moved, and enough breath remained in her lungs to croak out a single name. "Garrus." But he wasn't there. It was only Miranda's voice reaching her ears clearly, flashes of asari and humans crowding around her and lifting the debris off of her. Miranda was saying that she had to stay awake, but she had to be still. Keeta tried to shake her head, but she felt her skull shattering when she tried, so she pushed sound through her lips again. "Garrus." Miranda shook her head, saying something about the Normandy being carried away by the force of the blast from the Crucible. "Garrus," she insisted, and again, copper and ash filled her mouth. She coughed up blood, and Miranda had to turn her broken body to the side so that Keeta didn't choke on her own blood. She was saying something about no known casualties, but that wasn't enough.

_Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,_  
_And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,_  
_Do not go gentle into that good night._  
  
_Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight_  
_Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,_  
_Rage, rage against the dying of the light._

"Garrus," she tried again, but the sound became a gurgle as more blood clogged her throat. Miranda was yelling now, shouting orders that, somehow, human and asari alike began to follow without question. She'd always been a good leader, a natural commander. Not the same as Keeta, but good. Damn good.

Keeta closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, everything was white and silver and sterile. There were tubes in her nose and throat, and she was strapped down... no, not restrained, but she couldn't move. Someone was moving at her side, and she saw Miranda again. _Such a damn good leader, they let you into an operating room._ Keeta's eyes rolled in their sockets, and she could've sworn that her mother was behind the glass, snapping orders at someone or other who kept putting his hand up as if to lead her out of the room.

Keeta blinked, and there was her father, his arms tight over his chest and his jaw clenched. The professor of philosophy and diplomacy, who was powerless now in the face of an enemy he couldn't talk down. Hannah moved at last to stand beside her husband, and Payam remained still. The rear admiral was as powerless as the professor. Keeta wanted to call out, to tell them to wait outside, because they shouldn't watch this, but she was blinking again, and Miranda was holding her head still. She tried to ask Miranda where Garrus was, but she blinked.

_And you, my father, there on the sad height,_  
_Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray._  
_Do not go gentle into that good night._  
_Rage, rage against the dying of the light._

"Garrus," she whispered, voice harsh from disuse. She spoke before she was fully conscious, before she knew where she was or what had happened. Keeta wanted to scream, to pray. _I won't give up this time. Not even for a second. Please just let me see him again. Please let him be safe._ "Garrus."

Keeta felt something tightening around her fingers before her eyelids would pry open, felt that odd tingle in her chest as he moved close enough to feel the heat coming from his body. The light hurt, just like last time, but it wasn't shining directly into her eyes. His fringe was in the way. Keeta fought, raged at her body until she could see through the tears collecting in her eyes at his, brilliant and so close where he leaned over her. He was afraid to believe that she was waking up, that she was still herself, but unable to stop. She knew that look. "Told you," she managed, and his laugh was abrupt and startled.

"Yeah, you did."

Outside of her window, the sky was orange and gold.


End file.
